1. Samsung Takes Smartwatch Fight to Apple Considering that there’s no release date, price, or launch market specified, I think this headline is 2X the overstatement that it would be anyway. It runs Tizen, by the way. A variant will have a 3G modem. In terms of the modem and call functionality, I’m sincerely looking forward to seeing how that performs and what consumers think.

Instead of relying on a static list of threats to protect you, it’ll actually watch out for suspicious app behavior. […]

“Snapdragon Smart Protect is engineered to look at the actual behavior of device applications in real time and almost instantly detect and classify any application behavior that is considered suspicious or anomalous,” Qualcomm wrote in a blog post. “Suspicious applications are classified into severity levels of malware […].

4. Apple partners with Cisco to boost enterprise business I get uneasy when I read things like this. There’s no meaningful consumer problem to solve here. And for Apple, what’s the worst down-side to *not* doing this? To me, it means X fewer people working on new products or helping existing customers have a meaningfully better experience.

One big problem, Messrs. Cook and Chambers said, is ensuring employees get adequate networking performance in the workplace. Apple and Cisco said they aim to establish a “fast lane” for iOS devices in the corporate world, prioritizing wireless and Web connections so critical business applications aren’t compromised by a streaming cat videos and other nonbusiness fare.

Android was originally designed, above all else, to be widely adopted. Google was starting from scratch with zero percent market share, so it was happy to give up control and give everyone a seat at the table in exchange for adoption. […]

Android still uses a software update chain-of-command designed back when the Android ecosystem had zero devices to update, and it just doesn’t work. There are just too many cooks in the kitchen: Google releases Android to OEMs, OEMs can change things and release code to carriers, carriers can change things and release code to consumers. It’s been broken for years.

I couldn’t have said it better. The headline seems apt, too. I usually don’t write about security. 1) My experience is limited; 2) iOS isn’t perfect, either; and 3) it’s not quite a dynamic, cutting-edge topic. But the number and scale of issues on Android is getting ridiculous. Google made the trade-off between rapid scale and solid security. Scale won. And so “open” is now also a double-entendre.

Xiaomi and Huawei’s strategy is expected to directly impact AP providers such as MediaTek and Qualcomm. Within the global top-5 smartphone vendors, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi and LG, which together contribute over 60% of worldwide shipments, four of them have already adopted in-house developed APs or have been aggressively increasing their adoption, which could seriously damage independent ARM-AP suppliers as well as x86-based solution supplier Intel.

4. Michael Lopp (Rands in Repose): “Busy is a bug, not a feature.” I suppose it depends on the role. I agree that for a leader to be continuously busy, or “too busy”, is not a good sign. Though it is more complicated than that (“war time” vs. “peace time”, etc.). Michael is now at Pinterest. Another interesting part:

“It’s gonna sound like I’m lazy but I swear I’m not lazy,” he says. “My job is to get myself out of a job. I’m aggressively pushing things I think I could be really good at and should actually maybe own to someone else who’s gonna get a ‘B’ at it. But they’re gonna get the opportunity to go do that [and continue to learn in the process]. My job is to — it sounds like I just want to sit here and drink coffee and talk about bread — but it’s about pushing it down, so these things, which naturally come to me [go to others in the company].”

“These [US Senate report] findings reveal that there is a clear lack of appropriate security measures to protect drivers against hackers who may be able to take control of a vehicle or against those who may wish to collect and use personal driver information,” the report reads. […]

Hackers no longer need a direct connection to the vehicle [because] malware from Bluetooth-connected smartphones and security holes in onboard software, like OnStar, provide numerous avenues to take control remotely. Because examples of hacks happening to everyday drivers remain largely undocumented […] automakers are not taking them seriously. […]

[Also], automakers are constantly gathering information about drivers, including locations traveled to and how long the car remains parked. Companies then store that data with little protection, sometimes even in third-party data centers whose own security may not have proper safeguards. The report said automakers rarely inform consumers about the information they’ve collected.

The group estimates that as many as 500 to 630 million Android devices might not be capable of completely wiping the data saved in their internal disks and SD cards.

The estimate is far from exact, and the real number could be meaningfully lower, but it’s still in the hundreds of millions. As John Gruber, of Daring Fireball would say, tongue in cheek: “Open always wins.”

How is this relevant to any sort of mobile product? It’s not. It does show, however, that communicating value is often just as important as creating value. So to speak. The best part starts at 23:45. (Not suitable for work.)